If a student comes to you with a fundamental misunderstanding, try to sit with them one-on-one if you can, and try to find out what their problem is and try to help them. Always try to be open, always try to be available. That’s very difficult in first year, due to the large number of students, but just try to help people. Be honest and open.
Use small group student-centred interaction using structured work sheets that logically develop students' conceptual understanding. It’s a learning cycle approach.
Photocopy the problems rather than expecting students to download them from Blackboard, and take in only a few copies so that students have to share. They’re forced to work together. But that causes a problem at the end of the class if they all want their own copy, so you then have to go back and load it up onto Blackboard. But that sort of approach works quite well.
Get the students to present the solutions to NMR problems, with a bit of assistance. Point to a signal on the spectrum and say ‘have you thought about what that means?’ Give them some hints. Encourage the students themselves to be asking the questions about what the signals are or why you ignored a particular signal.
Try to encourage active learning in the lecture theatre. Talk about a concept and then ask them to look at some examples and work through them on their own.
Throw in pop quizzes when you discuss a concept and then give an example and give them a few minutes to work through that example. That's moving towards a partially flipped classroom context. Also use worksheets to give an increased level of formalisation to it.
Particularly for the VSEPR theory, models of any kind are great. Tell the students, 'Buy a model kit.' Because it has to be something three-dimensional. They need to bring their own models in so they can do it themselves.
When teaching electronic configuration, if it's a small class you can get each student in the class to be an electron. They can arrange themselves in different directions. It's really good if you've got steps in your classroom because you can demonstrate going up in energy. They face towards the front or the back of the room. If you simply tell them to think about parallel and antiparallel spins they come up with that themselves and it's really good when you can say, 'Yes, you came up with that yourselves.'
